In recent years the question "How can I help?" has become meaningful
to many people. But perhaps there is a deeper question we might consider.
Perhaps the real question is not "How can I help?" But "How can I serve?"

Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it
is not a relationship between equals. When you help you use your own strength
to help those of lesser strength. If I'm attentive to what is going on
inside of me when I'm helping, I find that I'm always helping someone who
is not as strong as I am, who is needier than I am. People feel this inequality.
When we help we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could
ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth,
integrity and wholeness. When I help I am very aware of my own strength.
But we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw
from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve, our wounds serve, even
our darkness can serve. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others
and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness
in me. Service is a relationship between equals.

Helping incurs debt. When you help someone they owe you one. But serving,
like healing is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person
that I am serving. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction.
When I serve I have a feeling of gratitude. These are very different things.

Serving is also different from fixing. When I fix a person I perceive
them as broken, and their brokeness requires me to act. When I serve I
see and trust that wholeness. It is what I am responding to and collaborating
with.

There is distance between ourselves and whatever or whomever we are
fixing. Fixing is a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a
disconnection, an experience of difference. In fixing there is an inequality
of expertise that can easily become a moral distance. We cannot serve at
a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected,
that which we are willing to touch. This is Mother Teresa's basic message.
We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.

If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of
mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of
mystery, surrender, and awe. A fixer has the illusion of being casual.
A server knows that he or she is being used and has a willingness to be
used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown.
Fixing and helping are very personal; they are very particular, concrete
and specific. We fix and help many different things in our lifetimes, but
when we serve we are always serving the same thing. Everyone who has ever
served through the history of time serves the same thing. We are servers
of the wholeness and mystery in life.

The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix without serving. And
we can help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping.
I think I would go so far as to say that fixing and helping may often be
the work of
the ego and service is the work of the soul. They may look similar
if you're watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different.
The outcome is often different too.

Our service serves us as well as others. That which uses us strengthens
us. Over time, fixing and helping are draining, depleting. Over time we
burn out. Service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will sustain
us.

Service rests on the basic premise that the nature of life is sacred,
that life is a holy mystery, which has an unknown purpose. When we serve,
we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. Fundamentally, helping,
fixing, and service are ways of seeing life. When you help you see life
as weak, when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see
life as whole. From the perspective of service, we are all connected. All
suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse
to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.

Lastly, fixing and helping is the basis of curing, but not of healing.
In 40 years of chronic illness I have been helped by many people and fixed
by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing
and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only
service heals.